Goblin Squad Member
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Now, something that's been bandied around is that Coin (let's refer to it as during this debate) is something that will be relatively limited in the Pathfinder World, at least at first, and the spread of currency will be semi-controlled by the 'Faucet' of Goblinworks-made/controlled Quests, found in Treasure in instanced 'Dungeons' and occasionally on some types of monsters.
So what happens if there's not enough Currency in the world?
At the risk of being thrown to the Torch-and-Pitchfork Mob (again) ... why not a secondary system of Barter and Material Goods in the place of Currency?
Fully controlled by the Players, Barter is a system where Player A and Player B negotiate between themselves, trading X amount of [Bags of Flour] for Y amount of [Skinned Rabbits].
Player B then goes to the next Farm/Tavern/Village/Town/WHATEVER IS GOD-DAMNED CLOSEST and trade some of his [Bags of Flour] for more goods, then moves on, trades some more of his [Bags of Flour] and other Trade Goods for more trade goods, so on and so forth.
And people are doing this everywhere. Goods are being shuffled around without needing long, painful merchant convoys, and the Smarter Merchants are running around trading for goods in one Hex that might be scarce, or even non-existant in another Hex, and making a profit in Goods and a small bit of Currency in that way.
Furthermore, would a selection of Trade/Crafting Goods be considered an acceptable substitute for Currency in terms of Quest-Rewards?
Party A and Party B are both sent out to gather Ore from a Wild Hex, knowing full well that the Miners they are escorting will inevitably attract the attention of nearby hostile NPCs and Bandit PCs, and demand a suitable payment in advance for their efforts.
Party A demands Currency up-front, while Party B accepts a majority of Crafting/Trade Goods and a smaller amount of Currency.
Both Parties survive, and the reward waiting for them is approximately the same in basic value. Party A has the benefit in that Currency is worth the same no matter where they go and is relatively light-weight, while Party B has the benefit in that their Trade/Craft Goods can go up in price if they head to the right Hex/Settlement.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think barter might be somewhat important, at least in the early stage like you say. It's value is dependent on how much secure storage is available. If we can only bank 50 encumbrance of stuff in town, I'm going to need coin for everything above that. And if my storage is at risk of theft, I'm going certainly want to hold coins instead.
Having said that, I like nicely laid out trade screens for barter trades.
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Goblin Squad Member
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There's also the point where a Settlement might find it easier to collect their Taxes in the form of Trade/Crafting Goods rather than Currency, as they might be able to on-sell the Goods for a higher price than they might get through the Currency they collect through the Taxes, or declaring they will accept 1 'unit' of Quarried Stone in place of 1 'unit' of Currency might be enough for them to stockpile the necessary components they need to build a stone wall around their settlement, rather than paying an overly-inflated cost to a Quarrier which would eat up more than what the Taxes would pay them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Hmm so this should be a stepping stone towards monetary economy?
I think if we had a mechanic like this it could also delay the arrival of the 'real' system. If you have a working, convenient system there is less incentive to work on getting an alternative running.
If players have no other option than go scrounge up some cash from humanoid mobs/quest rewards they will do exactly that. Of course you must be able to trade wares directly with people too but adapting the auction house to work like this seems possibly harmful to me. Prices may fluctuate a lot at the start until a steady state is reached but that's all part of the game and the fun.
Player settlements won't be constructed until several months of EE has passed. By then surely there will be a decent amount of coin in circulation.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well, here's some (as I see it) Pros and Cons to the two systems that could allow them to function independently and still compete without causing too much chaos.
Barter System:
Pros:
1) Constant supply of goods being shuffled around the Hexes, promoting Gathering and Crafting as necessary functions for all characters to a certain level.
2) No shortage of Goods, as they may be the standard 'currency' for a region that has found itself short on actual physical Currency such as Gold Coins.
3) Free-Form Markets. An Item or Good that might be worth X amount of other goods one day may become worth far more, or far less, depending upon a variety of situations. Maybe a rich ore vein has been found, maybe it started raining again and the drought has ended.
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Cons:
1) Takes up encumbrance like nobody's business and can limit the full amount of gear/adventuring items you may be able to carry on your person or store in your vault.
2) A sudden shortage of a 'necessary' item can lead to a horrific destabilization of the Barter System, especially if it is a base-line item required to keep one or more Development Indexes running smoothly or is required for the day-to-day operations of the primary industry of the Settlement.
3) Physical Items that can be easily looted by Bandits, meaning that your 'haul' is far more vulnerable than a pouch of gold coins ever was.
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Coin/Currency System:
Pros:
1) Lower encumbrance values, or perhaps no encumbrance value, to the 'Currency' in the game, meaning that valuable Vault-slots or Encumbrance on the Character are not tied up in the event of an emergency.
2) Coin or 'Currency' often has a set 'value' in comparison to Trade Goods, which can fluctuate with the seasons, Escalations or just plain old Player Shenanigans. A Gold Coin is a Gold Coin at all times. It will never rot, decay or 'die' of old age like a Trade good such as Food, Lumber or Livestock.
3) Gold has always been a popular medium. Soft to work with, attractive to almost everyone and always coveted, a Merchant who can offer Coin might be able to buy an item for cheaper than a rival who can only offer a higher amount of Trade Goods, especially if the Seller in question wants the sale now or needs to pay off a debt sooner rather than later.
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Cons:
1)Lower volume in the 'World' than Trade Goods, meaning that it will be harder to come by, and often have an inflated value to it that may drive people to the Barter System, at least at first.
2) Bandits cannot loot 'Coins' at this stage, meaning that Smart Bandits will demand in their S.A.D. to have Coin, rather than bulky Trade/Crafting Goods which might slow them down or be identified when they send their Middle-Men cohorts in to town to trade the stolen goods.
3) A dependence upon 'Coins' might lead to a situation where if a Settlement expends all their Currency on building fortifications or hiring mercenaries to push back an Escalation or a rival Settlement's army, the culture 'shock' of moving to the Barter System because nobody has enough coin for the basic values established within the Settlement that people become paralyzed and the markets stall, or worse still, become the feeding grounds of cunning Merchants who know how to work the Barter System mercilessly for their own gain.
I'm probably not 'putting this down' in the correct phrasing, but it's just some theoretical 'problems' I could see popping up with each system.
Having the Barter and Currency systems running together gives Players options for trading that might mesh well, depending upon the time they can/will spend in-game and how to get around 'Currency' shortages if the amount of 'Currency' in the game ends up flowing into only a few pockets, or flows too 'slowly' for some settlements, who may be leap-frogging ahead with a larger pool of players to help push the Building and Development of the Hex and Settlement along.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Cons:
1)Lower volume in the 'World' than Trade Goods, meaning that it will be harder to come by
Why do you suppose this will be the situation?
The way I see it, coin is like other resources, with added perks:- Can be reliably farmed (from mobs or through 'quests' or NPC contracts
- There is a faucet for coin entrance into economy, drain for leaving. In theory, unlimited amount that can exist in the economy.
- Coin is 'globally accessible' to players (i.e. magical bank account)
- Since coin is not really in player 'inventory', no fear of coin loss upon death while moving from place to place.
I can't see how cattle, painted shells, amber, potatoes or any other resource would be able to compete with coin since coin has all the advantages of other resources plus extra convenience.
Money will basically grow on trees in this game (or rather on goblins). The real world's history with shortage of noble metals, technological advances required for minting coins, forgery, etc. do not apply since coin is a harvestable resource in this game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I believe that Goblinworks has stated that not every mob will drop Coins, nor will large amounts of Coin be available at the start of the game. Also they have gone on record in saying that the 'limitless currency' is a pitfall they wish to avoid, if I recall correctly.
I'm personally quite a fan of this. Coin is something we all want, something that everyone can automatically agree is worth X amount of this and Y amount of that. Having a 'limit' on coin in the game makes money actually worth something (yes, I know, I realised as soon as I said it!)and it becomes something worth fighting over.
Imagine there's only five hundred thousand Gold Coins, two million Silver Coins and ten million Copper Coins in the game at the launch.
We could easily assign a third of that to the Early Enrollers, a third more locked up in Instanced Dungeons and a third of that scattered in NPC Factions and 'Creeps'.
That's a lot of 'spread' between the coins. Most folk would consider themselves rich to have a few hundred gold coins to their names. And suddenly Currency is worth a damn, and the 'Adventurer' types become harvesters of 'Currency', liberating it from the environment and bringing it back to the Settlements and other players.
Adventurers won't want to be tied down or weighted down by Trade/Crafting goods a moment longer than they have to be, but for Gatherer-type PCs, the opposite is true. Adventurers come back to town, spend up big for their next foray into the Wilds, get drunk, stampede the villagers, molest the goats and then go on their merry way.
Now that Coin is flowing through the Settlements, being traded for goods and services, and then flows out of town with the Merchants who have brought other goods not commonly available in the surrounding Hexes, thereby increasing the Trade/Crafting Goods available in the Settlement at the expense of SOME Trade Goods and Some Coins.
With a Finite Currency, suddenly the inflation that plagues a lot of MMOs will rapidly die in it's rancid, sweat-shop-spawned ass before it can get a toe-hold in the game. Demand 100,000 Gold Coins for your cool-looking-but-mechanically-crap items in the Auction House (and don't forget these are 'local' Auction Houses. Goblinworks has stated no Global Mailboxes or Auction Houses are included in the current system!) and you'll be ignored. A slow increase in Currency means that 'Wealth' as we commonly accept it, ie 'Lots of Money', is something rare and a sign of status and power in the game.
Unlike Trade Goods, Coins are, at this point in time, theoretically unlootable by Bandits or Rival Players, but Trade/Crafting Goods are easy pickings. On the other hand, while clumsy and awkward to carry around, everybody will need some Trade Goods or Crafting Goods at least for a short while in their careers, whatever that might be, but Coin can ONLY be used for purchasing, be it a new sword, bribing that surly Dwarf to not kick your jimmies in or slipping coins into the Half-Elf Pole-dancer's loincloth.
It's a powerful tool, but it's also limited in what it can do, while the Barter System is more versatile but inherently 'clumsy' by comparison.
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Goblin Squad Member
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For starters, at early EE there will only be one 'town' (supposedly not even a real settlement), probably meaning only one auction house (not that this has a lot of bearing on the discussion).
You seem to imply that the coin faucet will be controlled to a greater extent than other goods faucet, why do you believe that to be the case? (I'm not being sarcastic, if there are dev quotes to back it I would be most interested).
While people should be allowed to freely trade goods between each other at whatever rate they choose to (personal trade through classic trade windows) I still don't think it will be necessary to accommodate for barter of goods through the auction house. So you have pelts and you want swords but you have no money. Then find a buyer for those pelts and then buy swords.. or find a swordsmith/merchant to do direct trade with.
On a community level, it should be better to have one metric (coin) to compare all other valuables against than to have individual conversion rates for all types of goods.
Adventurers will gather coin and then go to town and spend it, supplying the crafters with money to buy materials from gatherers of materials, creating a cycle that will repeat over and over with a continually increasing turnover of goods, coin and material.
At the start it will be slow but possibly characters won't be super specialized from day one, doing a bit of both gathering, crafting and questing until the economic wheels start spinning. Unless they are part of a community like a guild/CC run along cooperative principles, rather than market economy.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Possibly. If it's purely a player-based system, it makes an excellent 'stand in' until Players can gain enough 'Currency' to swap to a more normal state of affairs.
If Goblinworks were to actually code it in, I think it would make an interesting twist in the game. Imagine having a game that had two separate styles of economy in it? You have the Barter System, and you have the Currency System. Both have their uses, and both have their draw-backs, but which will serve your character best, or will you utilize a mixture of the two?
At the end of the day, as cool as that would be, I think it would be more likely for it to be a purely Player-Implemented System, where the Players themselves dictate the value of items to be Bartered back and forth, based upon their need for the Goods, the rarity of the Goods and other factors.
We're already stepping well off the beaten track by avoiding having Quests for anything and everything, and let's not forget the 'No Levels' and 'No Classes' would be very jarring for the average Gamer who who has come up on games like Everquest and WoW, throwing in a feature like that might just confuse the hell out of them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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There an another con that you forgot for the barter system (also call troc).
Inflation.
Because ressouces are infinite (more than one person could stach lot of good) The price for a rarer item will be more and more high. Because the common ressources will be more and more available. This is the reason why GW will have a control currency.
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Goblin Squad Member
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There an another con that you forgot for the barter system (also call troc).
Inflation.
Because ressouces are infinite (more than one person could stach lot of good) The price for a rarer item will be more and more high. Because the common ressources will be more and more available. This is the reason why GW will have a control currency.
From what Ive read, I would expect goods inflation to naturally be countered to some degree by the following:
- 25% destruction on death
- new players selling to NPC vendors (which would more or less remove that item from circulation, assuming that these goods are not available from NPC vendors to begin with)
- 0 durability items being recycled for less than their original 'value' (bit of an assumption on my part here)
- Discovery of new high level schematics which require ever-increasing amounts of these low level items.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I believe that Resources will not be commonly regenerating. You'll only find X Resource in Y-type Hex, and those Resources will be spread out over the huge space of the Hex.
Player-Made Structures like Farms, Quarries, Lumber Mills, Mines and Fish Farms (and this is speculation on my part, as we have yet to have any Goblinworks Posters give us any word on such structures) might provide a continuous stream of Resources, but I really can't see those popping up at the start of the Game (Early Enrolment), and if they are implemented as unique structures within a non-Settlement Hex, I could fully see them being bitterly fought over and attracting a hell of a lot of NPC attention.
AS I UNDERSTAND THE GAME THUS FAR, Resources and Currency are both finite within the game, with Currency being slowly injected into the game via Goblinworks, and Resources being found in small 'nodes' or looted from/traded from/stolen from NPCs.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As of yet, we don't know how often Resources will regenerate. If they use the EvE method where Resources are plentiful and then slowly whittled down over the course of a day, that certainly throws a wrinkle into the Barter Method, but at the same point, with EvE they need that because warping to another Sector to get some more goodies is only a five minute trip, even during your first hour in the game.
If they use the 'Node' Spawning method common in MMOs like WoW, where there are a finite amount of Nodes per Map, and those Nodes must be used up and then there is a cooldown before a new Node, randomly selected from the list common to that Map (Mineral nodes spawn either Common or Rich types of Metal ores, or rarely a Uncommon Metal Ore, for example), that causes much the same problem, even with the sheer size of the Hex involved.
I think if they're going to have Regenerating Nodes, we're likely going to see a longer 'Cooldown' than we've seen in the Themepark MMOs, if only to stop the 'camping' tactics of Bot Farmers.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As of yet, we don't know how often Resources will regenerate. If they use the EvE method where Resources are plentiful and then slowly whittled down over the course of a day, that certainly throws a wrinkle into the Barter Method, but at the same point, with EvE they need that because warping to another Sector to get some more goodies is only a five minute trip, even during your first hour in the game.
If they use the 'Node' Spawning method common in MMOs like WoW, where there are a finite amount of Nodes per Map, and those Nodes must be used up and then there is a cooldown before a new Node, randomly selected from the list common to that Map (Mineral nodes spawn either Common or Rich types of Metal ores, or rarely a Uncommon Metal Ore, for example), that causes much the same problem, even with the sheer size of the Hex involved.
I think if they're going to have Regenerating Nodes, we're likely going to see a longer 'Cooldown' than we've seen in the Themepark MMOs, if only to stop the 'camping' tactics of Bot Farmers.
While GW hasn't submitted to anything concrete, they have made statements along the lines of nodes leaving areas, and rather than spawning in the same hex, appearing in completely different hexes, with a preference towards spawning in hexes that have not recently been traveled. If this is the case re-finding the material isn't going to be a matter of searching the hex, or even the surrounding set of hexes, but possibly be dependant on world explorers.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Agreed. No more 'farming bots', since finding these 'wild nodes' will be as much an act of random chance, given the sheer size of the Hexes, as well as finding and recognizing the visual 'clues' for specific types of nodes. Exposed Rocky areas might be the best source of Mineral Nodes, while Lush Grass might provide the best sources of specific Herbs, so on and so forth.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ah and found the quote to back my statement
The distribution of materials is likely to be randomized and to move around. In other words, when you mine out a vein of mithril, a new vein will spawn elsewhere in the world.
I would not be surprised if we built in a bias for exotic materials tending to spawn in empty hexes...
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Goblin Squad Member
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Barter has a place both when there is too little coin and too much coin. I except that the highest quality components initially will not be sold on the open market and bartering for something of equal value/rarity will be the best way to obtain them.
Barter in the simplest form is the simple trade window and requires both parties online, adjacent and carrying their goods with them.
Advanced barter can be done through contract system. We only need
- a way to list contracts
- a way to put goods in someone elses storage
- potentially a way to instruct our storage to deliver certain goods to certain characters under certain conditions, or even better: to instruct our storage to offer/accept certain trades.
This should allow me to a) enter a barter agreement and b) deliver my goods without even being online at the same time as my trading partner. (S)he could likewise deliver goods to my storage while I am offline or otherwise occupied.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ah and found the quote to back my statement
The distribution of materials is likely to be randomized and to move around. In other words, when you mine out a vein of mithril, a new vein will spawn elsewhere in the world.
I would not be surprised if we built in a bias for exotic materials tending to spawn in empty hexes...
Remember also, the rarer materials are more likely to spawn in the more dangerous zones, and the extraction of those materials attracts the attention of mobs and PCs. A bot would very likely fall prey to one or the other.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Barter has a place both when there is too little coin and too much coin. I except that the highest quality components initially will not be sold on the open market and bartering for something of equal value/rarity will be the best way to obtain them.
Barter in the simplest form is the simple trade window and requires both parties online, adjacent and carrying their goods with them.
Advanced barter can be done through contract system. We only need
- a way to list contracts
- a way to put goods in someone elses storage
- potentially a way to instruct our storage to deliver certain goods to certain characters under certain conditions, or even better: to instruct our storage to offer/accept certain trades.This should allow me to a) enter a barter agreement and b) deliver my goods without even being online at the same time as my trading partner. (S)he could likewise deliver goods to my storage while I am offline or otherwise occupied.
Agreed, I think there will be Barter but only in special occasions. Barter within a settlement will be the most common, especially when war is imminent.
As a fan of Barter in the real world (my business is in a barter network) I think the biggest problem a barter/trade system would have in an online economy is that people ask for unrealistic demands with virtual goods that they don't actually "need". Anybody who has ever tried to pull trades in Fantasy Football knows what I'm talking about.
Nobody wants a reasonable trade, very few people understand the concept of "giving value for value". Trade networks need to be set against a common currency people know. Very few people actually trade in permuta nowadays.
Also very important to understand is that alternative currency is a result of a currency that is not designed for the needs of many people (ie: the US dollar is designed for banks and lenders of capital). But skybits will be designed for the player base of PFO and is full of artificial faucets and drains to make it work for the players of PFO. So unless GW's has absolutely no clue what they are doing, an alternate market will be pretty unnecessary except for a few special cases like we stated.
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Goblin Squad Member
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But skybits will be designed for the player base of PFO and is full of artificial faucets and drains to make it work for the players of PFO.
Just a minor correction.
SkyMetal Bits are the Cash Shop currency, and as far as we know we won't be able to trade them.
Coin is the in-game currency.
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Goblin Squad Member
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But skybits will be designed for the player base of PFO and is full of artificial faucets and drains to make it work for the players of PFO.Just a minor correction.
SkyMetal Bits are the Cash Shop currency, and as far as we know we won't be able to trade them.
Coin is the in-game currency.
Which brings another reason I didn't mention. GW's is already providing 2 monetary systems specifically designed for the needs of PFO players. It is unlikely any sustainable niche of the economy will not be covered by at least one of the two.
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Goblin Squad Member
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There's going to be barter--there will always be cases where producers are 1) adjacent, 2) have complementary production 3) Can the make the equal, unequal.
But that describes an extremely small set of possible transactions. Barter is either a small epiphenomenon within a more advanced economy (e.g. one with money, banking intermediaries), or the whole of a very primitive economy.
@DeciusBrutus: The more valuable the production traded, the greater the risk from unequal trade terms--errors in gauging relative production are magnified in direct proportion to the value of the trade. That's a strong disincentive against barter, in favor of monetarized transactions.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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If there are four different items which are consumed in the development of a particular settlement structure, and the four competing settlements each have three copies of one of them, what should the purchase price of each of those items be? The first group to sell for coin is the last one to complete the set.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In EVE, almost everything you find has a game-generated estimated value. You can never count on getting that amount on the market, but it gives players a rough estimate of the value of unfamiliar items. Given that we'll all be unfamiliar with the relative value of items during EE, an estimated value property for each item might bee useful in PFO, too.
"You traded the Exceptional Cow for beans? You fool!"
"You traded the Beans of Growth for a cow? Get out of my sight!"
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Goblin Squad Member
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I was trying to provide a concrete example of an economic situation where people had a product that they were not willing to sell for coin or skymetal, but were willing to trade for another, similarly rare and valuable, product.
Collectors do this more often than you might think. My older brother is a gun collector, has a federal License for it, which allows him to collect military issue weapons older than 500 years (I believe although it could be 40).
He frequently trades one weapon for another, having cycled through his collection being from one war era to another, or from one national manufacturer to another.
The first items that I think you will see on the collector's market (trade or barter) will be the Daily Deal items.
What has not been addressed here, are these few questions:
Is the barter system being proposed exclusively player-to-player trading, outside of the AH trading?
Have you seen that there is some discussion of player-to-player trading having an impact (positive or negative) on your alignment and or reputation based on whom you trade with?
If the alignment / reputation impact does become a reality, how do you foresee that impacting the barter system?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm a big fan of bartering and I hope it happens often...I know I'll be bartering, if only to help out fellow players who don't have the coin for whatever I might be trading. In Rift, where I ran a rather profitable raw materials harvesting company, I would often accept a trade of goods, not so much because I had a use for what they were offering, but because I knew someone down the line might, and I'd make my money back that way. I even had a goblin in UO named Grubb(pic here...Greedalox eat your heart out :) ) who never did anything but barter, though that was more to provide entertainment at the bank (though I did work my way up to some rather valuable items).
Though both these situations were as much (or more) for fun and to help out others who lacked cash rather than to create a secondary currency system that everyone was using, I was able to trade up to bigger and better items before cashing out and making a profit.
What I do think would be possible is a barter auction house. Player A places 100 iron ore on the market and instead of typing in the buyout price to purchase, he opens the listing menu, selects the category of item he's looking to trade for, narrows the search to the exact item - say, pine boards - and types in the quantity it will take to win his iron ore. This might be trickier for finished goods, especially if an item with specific keywords was being asked for as payment, but for more common goods and raw materials, I think it would be a handy substitute for purchasing with coin. If the system was a bit more robust, perhaps hopeful "buyers" could enter an offer not listed (choosing a different item from the market listing or a different quantity than asked) and the original poster could either accept or deny the trade.
I just toss this out as an idea. Personally, I much prefer dealing directly with my customers, so I likely won't be using auction houses of any kind...at least not with Hobs.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think we've reached a critical mass of posts where I'm finding it harder and harder to go back and dig up the old quotes that I vaguely remember. I think it's time I did something more concrete...
While I think there is great value in finding old quotes, there may be equal value or even more value in putting forward ideas that may prove better solutions than what those old quotes represent.
If alignment / reputation were built into the P2P trade, that would have a prohibitive effect on trade and direct player to player interaction.
One of my character concepts was to have a LG Monk that would travel around the River Kingdoms and freely give healing salves to any character that he encounters, who is injured. He would do this regardless of the character's alignment, which he has no ability of knowing, but even if they were known to be evil, that is all the more reason for him to show caring and generosity ("Hearts and Minds" argument). This is truly representative of a LG act, and yet in the proposed system he would take alignment and reputation hits for it.
yet another example of how an overly intrusive, mechanically impacting, alignment system inhibits role playing.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If alignment / reputation were built into the P2P trade, that would have a prohibitive effect on trade and direct player to player interaction.
If the goal is to make Alignment and Reputation matter, then that's a feature, not a bug. And there are tons and tons of old quotes where Ryan is explaining that why those things have to matter - because PvP needs to be regulated to avoid PFO devolving into the same kind of anti-social mess that most Open PvP games devolve into.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If the goal is to make Alignment and Reputation matter, then that's a feature, not a bug. And there are tons and tons of old quotes where Ryan is explaining that why those things have to matter - because PvP needs to be regulated to avoid PFO devolving into the same kind of anti-social mess that most Open PvP games devolve into.
That is what the reputation system is for. Not all CE characters are going to have a low reputation. Not all griefers are going to be CE. Alignment has nothing to do with whether or not the player is playing within the flagging system and or not griefing.
When they propose to mix, PVE, PVP, Alignment and Reputation it creates a muddled mess where by following all of the "rules" you could still end up producing a false positive. That equals a bad system.
Alignment is character role playing, access to certain skills, relationship with a character's deity.
Reputation is player actions within or outside of the rules. If a player's reputation hits -7500, ban him or her for a time period. That is how you handle griefing.
Here is a very simple question:
If a Lawful Good Cleric heals a Chaotic Evil thief, who is dieing from his wounds, should that LG Cleric lose both alignment and reputation?
EDIT: This topic of the thread is not concerning PVP but trade, so I don't know why anti griefing is being brought up?
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Goblin Squad Member
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That is what the reputation system is for.
Yeah...
If alignment / were built into the P2P trade...
******
Alignment is character role playing, access to certain skills, relationship with a character's deity.
That you assert this does not make it so. There are tons of quotes from Ryan describing why Alignment is important.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Alignment is character role playing, access to certain skills, relationship with a character's deity.That you assert this does not make it so. There are tons of quotes from Ryan describing why Alignment is important.
Are the instances where I said alignment is important, not supporting the idea that alignment is important?
But, you missed answering this question:
If a Lawful Good Cleric heals a Chaotic Evil thief, who is dieing from his wounds, should that LG Cleric lose both alignment and reputation?
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Goblin Squad Member
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If the LG Cleric is traveling with a CN/CE band of Outlaws to heal them between their raids, should he remain LG?
What if he helps them by carrying valuables?
That is not the question. It was obviously meant in its simplest form.... but I will qualify that the LG Cleric comes upon the wounded thief, that he knows is CE.
If a Lawful Good Cleric heals a Chaotic Evil thief, who is dieing from his wounds, should that LG Cleric lose both alignment and reputation?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ah, so *your* questions are deserving of answers, but *mine* are not. Got it.
There is a way to balance these two situations:
If a Lawful Good Cleric heals a Chaotic Evil thief, who is dieing from his wounds, should that LG Cleric lose both alignment and reputation?
If the LG Cleric is traveling with a CN/CE band of Outlaws to heal them between their raids, should he remain LG?
If the Cleric takes an alignment/reputation hit every time she heals someone of a profoundly different alignment, then she can do it sometimes/rarely and not change her alignment. She will drift back to her core alignment. If she makes a habit of it, her alignment will eventually drift to the CE thief/Outlaws alignment.
This could easily fall within the concepts of core/active alignment and who we deal with affects our alignment, if They decide it works that way.